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The Trouble With John Pilger’s The Coming War on China
I was left feeling an odd mixture of sympathy and exasperation after enduring John Pilger’s latest documentary, The Coming War on China.
Despite the journalist’s long career of opposing tyranny, oppression, and dictatorship wherever he may find it, Pilger’s loathing of the United States has led him to produce a film that acts as an apology for Chinese totalitarianism, distorts the truth about Asian politics, and presents China as a passive victim in a potential new superpower war. Actually, my sympathy for his intellectual descent is less sincere than my anger; what I watched was an incendiary spectacle that manages to circle the triumvirate of narcissism, ignorance, and propaganda.
I must admit a few things first. Among others it was Pilger who first sparked my interest in journalism. He gave me a short interview I published in December 2014. Later, I interviewed him again for an article I wrote on the 40th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. Afterwards, however, we stopped conversing by email for a number of reasons.
Now, with personal reasons in light and with personal reasons aside, let me come to The Coming War on China, which was released at selected cinemas in Britain this month. First, the title had me concerned. “With” might have given the sense of shared responsibility for the possible war, but only an aggressor commits a war “on” another country. Pilger’s intellect cannot be doubted, so his semantic choice must have been intentional.
Much of the first 40 minutes of the 122 minute long documentary explores the United States’ destruction of Marshall Islands, used in the 1940s as a site for nuclear testing. It is upsetting and disturbing viewing, complete with the racist language of the 1940s and 1950s and the ease in which the people of the islands were exploited by the American government. It compares in effect to Pilger’s documentary on the destruction of the Chagos Islands, Stealing a Nation. A short part compares how the wealthy American expats live on the islands compared to the destitute locals, which is termed by Pilger as “apartheid in the Pacific.” Again, this is heartbreaking.
But, I found myself asking as the sequence ended, what does this have to do with the topic of the documentary: escalating tensions between the United States and China in the 21st century? Certainly what the United States did was a crime, but it was a crime committed decades ago. And except that the Marshall Islands are home to U.S. missile bases, there appears to be no other connection to the rest of the documentary.
The Coming War on China does not engage in lies but it evades the truth so much that it is rendered invisible. (One doesn’t know whether Pilger appreciates his thoughts are often verbatim to what regularly appears in Chinese state television, though he fails to include one single clip from this media instead relying on a montage of American news shows to indicate a warmongering United States.) If, according to Joseph Goebbels, by telling a lie enough times it becomes the truth, then the reverse is also true: by evading the truth enough times it becomes a lie.
This is what Pilger does throughout. For example, at the same time as the United States was tricking the people of the Marshall Islands back onto into highly contaminated and radiated homes, leaving many to die, the Communist Party of China was launching a nationwide campaign to suppress counter-revolutionaries. The official number of deaths when it came to an end was as high as 700,000, though some historians put it around the two million mark.
The latter is not mentioned by Pilger. In fact, even the casual viewer would probably notice that he fails to mention any of the crimes committed by the CPC – even a visit to the party’s museum warrants no reference to these. For example, he mentions the Cultural Revolution in passing but doesn’t provide the unwitting viewer with the fact that as many as 30 million people died during these eleven years. He only says it gave way to “silence,” a most cruel euphemism. Indeed, Pilger is at his worst when he speaks with euphemisms, with the figurative raising of the eyebrow.
Aside from the euphemism is the outright contradiction. For example, in direct contrast to the wealth of the Americans being critiqued in the Marshall Islands – and paired with America’s predatory capitalism of his earlier documentaries – the wealth of the Chinese is something Pilger doesn’t challenge. He listens without comment as he is told that China now has more billionaires than the United States. Upon making a return to China for the first time in decades (perhaps that’s the reason why he hardly mentions the country and never leaves the city to explore the countryside) he says that “coming back the change is barely comprehensible. Here in Shanghai the freedom bears no comparison.” He goes on: “Yes, there are issues with human rights, especially the right to speak against the state and challenge its power. Since I was last here, millions of people have been lifted out of poverty, many into a new middle class.”
He suggests that this growth of the middle class has been overlooked in the West or, perhaps, “willfully misunderstood” (This is not the first time Pilger has talked down to other journalists for not noting what he has seen). And then he suggests that since China has matched the United States at its own game of capitalism, it is “unforgivable,” supposedly, to the United States.
In a long article for the New Internationalist, published this month, Pilger does at least mention that inequality is rising and protests are taking place but goes on to say that “for all the difficulties of those left behind by China’s rapid growth… what is striking is the widespread sense of optimism that buttresses the epic of change.” Where is the interest in the millions of Chinese suffering in the ilk of his 2001 documentary The New Rulers Of The World, which deplored Asia becoming the workhouse of the world and its cheap laborers the greatest export?
Perhaps the most illustrative part of this documentary is the relatively short time he spends in China. There, he interviews Zhang Weiwei, the former advisor to Deng Xiaoping, who describes the former premier as a “visionary” and goes on criticize the BBC and other Western media for mentioning in their news reports that China has a communist party and is an autocracy, and dismisses these as just labels, which Pilger doesn’t respond to. “If you watch BBC or CNN or read the Economist,” Zhang says, “and try to understand China, it will be a failure.” Again, no rebuttal from Pilger.
Then to Eric Li, a man Pilger describes as an entrepreneur and one of the confident political class. “In China there are a lot of problems,” Li says. “But at the moment, the Party state has proven an extraordinary ability to change.” He goes on to say that the reforms of the last 60 years are broader and greater than any other country in modern history. Pilger doesn’t ask whether these reforms were wanted by the people.
He then talks to Lijia Zhang, a Beijing-based journalist who published the best-selling book, ironically titled Socialism Is Great! “Many Americans imagine,” she says, “that Chinese people live a miserable, repressed life with no freedom whatsoever. That’s not true.” She says that if you talk to Chinese people (queue videos of smiling people) they will tell you that they are happy.
Amid all of this, Pilger does at least ask the question of exploitation of poor people as the principle creator of wealth. Zhang palms him off, saying that if you go and talk to the poor, the internal migrant workers, “you will be surprised that they have experienced greater increase in income than any other social groups.” Pilger does go to the poor but for less than a few minutes, simply showing their impoverished homes.
He asks Zhang about Tiananmen Square, saying the demonstrators fought for democratic change in China. “It was more than a tragedy, it was a massacre,” Pilger states, “of which the memory remains a raw presence in China.” He then asks Zhang: why does the Chinese state still fear “the few that speak out? He then informs the viewer about Liu Xiaobo, and listens as Zhang accuses the Nobel Peace Prize committee of making a “mistake” in naming Liu as a winner. “And yet in China today the spirit of protest lives on in different forms,” Pilger finishes.
All in all, Pilger’s exploration of the modern-day problems of China lasts from the 55th minute until 66th, much of which is given over to optimistic interviews with Chinese commentators and former government officials, who downplay the crimes of the government. One might say, well, at least Pilger does at least consider the democratic and human rights of more than one billion people.
But wait. The next section, called “Resistance,” which spans from the 66th minute until the 92nd, is dedicated to the actions of islanders in Japan and South Korea fighting against U.S. military bases – in South Korea, this takes the form of a dozen Catholics and two Quakers. Of course, the islanders’ fight is a noble one and they deserve attention. However, what is one to read from Pilger dedicating just 11 minutes to the fight of a billion people for democracy, human rights, and some autonomy from a country that happens to be the focus of the documentary, and 26 minutes to a small number of people in Japan and South Korea fighting against military bases?
Pilger begins the documentary by saying it is “a film about the human spirit, and about the rise of an extraordinary resistance.” But where is the extraordinary resistance mounted against China’s foreign endeavors? Why does he not mention the resistance of the Burmese against the Myitsone Dam? Or the Lao people to stop much of the country’s north being sold for cheap to Chinese businessmen? Or, for that matter, the Lao who demonstrated against their government after China decided to build dozens of dams in the country that will destroy most of the Mekong River? Or, even give one sentence over to the anti-Chinese protests in Vietnam? It is a shame Pilger does not even mention these, or that Myanmar is now a democratic country while China was happy to allow its murderous military junta to try to create a nation of slaves.
Pilger consistently glosses over China’s past crimes while dwelling on America’s. He doesn’t mention that it was China that kept the Khmer Rouge in AK-47s, preventing Cambodia for returning to peace until almost two decades after the genocidal regime was overthrown in 1979. Neither does he ever mention Tibet or the Chinese role in the Vietnam War, and its continuing propping up of North Korea. Neither does he consider China’s actions in the South China Sea in more than a passing reference. Neither, for one moment, does he consider China’s economic actions abroad in the negative. Quite the opposite, in fact. In his New Internationalist article, he lauds China’s “New Silk Road,” saying that it “has the approval of much of humanity,” adding, with a sense of anti-West triumphalism, that “along the way, [it] is uniting China and Russia; and they are doing it entirely without ‘us’ in the West.” (This goes against the noble forms of resistance against Chinese capital abroad I mentioned above).
Indeed, he never considers this to be a Chinese form of globalization and, dare I say, economic imperialism – one of the world’s last Marxist-Leninist countries must have purged Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism from its reading list. “The initiative is a timely reminder that China under the Communist Party is building a new empire,” Friedrich Wu, a professor at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, told the Financial Times last year. How can Pilger sit back and applaud the so-called “Beijing Consensus,” which exports the worse of globalization to the world – the rise of predatory capitalism without the expectation for countries to develop democratically?
Pilger’s scattershots do not cohere to a conclusion; they only seek to confirm to his narrative. His anti-Americanism blurs all. In journalism circles, one could say he is not being objective. This is not necessarily a bad thing: one enjoys a good deal of subjectivity in reporting. But Pilger takes this to the extreme.
It is only in the last 30 minutes that the viewer actually gets to hear anything about the coming war. Though, 30 minutes is far too long. Indeed, this 122 minute documentary only makes a few boilerplate points: U.S. military bases “encircle” China, Obama has spent more on nuclear weapons than any other president, and U.S. military officials tend to speak in a gung-ho fashion about war. Here, I agree with Pilger. The United States has built bases that surround China, the outgoing administration is spending more on nuclear weapons than predecessors, and military officials aren’t the most softly-spoken people in front of cameras. But that doesn’t mean the United States is containing China or encircling it or, worse, threatening it.
Pilger tends to see coincidence as correlation. Since China is building its army at the same time as the United States tries to reassert authority in Asia, the former must be a result of the latter. That the United States has bases in much of the Pacific must mean it is on the war path. Yet, he never mentions the rise of Chinese nationalism under President Xi Jinping. As other leaders before Xi have learned, nationalism can be relied upon when other forms of legitimacy disappear. (In a speech in November 2013, Xi reiterated his goals of “the great revival of the Chinese nation.”)
Neither does Pilger look into military spending by China, which has been constant since 1994, according to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. In 1994, military expenditure was 1.7 percent of GDP, rising to 2.2 percent in 2001, and falling to 1.9 percent in 2015. In fact, as a percentage of government spending, military expenditure was more than double its 2015 value in 1994 (6.3 percent in 2015, compared to 14.4 percent in 1994). This precedes the United States’ “pivot to Asia” by more than a decade. Lastly, Pilger never inquires into whether other countries in the region might actually take the United States’ side on the issue, or, for that matter, why the countries now lining up behind China – Cambodia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Russia, and so on – tend to be either autocratic, partly democratic, or under the guardianship of populists with dictatorial-leanings. Without reference to these, his narrative tumbles into a dangerous excuse, or propaganda, for the Chinese state.
Worse, he sees any country allied with the United States as a warmonger. While exploring opposition to U.S. bases in Japan, he criticizes the country’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, whose American “patron” has helped stoke Japanese nationalism and to reassert Japanese power. He does the same for South Korea. Just perhaps, however, the Japanese and South Korean governments are reacting to Chinese assertive actions rather than being belligerent on their own accord. As I was told last year by the journalist Bill Hayton, author of The South China Sea: The Struggle for Power in Asia, “the U.S. hasn’t been forcing these countries to ask it to send military equipment and ships. These countries are nervous and are asking the U.S. for reassurance because they perceive a threat from China.”
A fallacy arises here. Pilger descends into the myth that the United States is all powerful – the repeated use of an image of military bases around the world seeks to convey this. Yet, if its power and warmongering attitude were true, then why, one can ask, hasn’t the United States gone to war with China already? Presumably, a conflict-craving nation wouldn’t allow China to build up its nuclear and military capabilities before attacking. The fact that China now has the world’s second largest expenditure on its military, after the United States, would actually deter the latter from attacking, one might assume.
A more nuanced understanding of the situation would be to admit that both the United States and China are engaging in actions that could run the risk of sparking a new superpower war. More serious articles and books have explored the duality of the situation, treating both the United States and China as equal players, and I would recommend any of the following before watching one minute of The Coming War on China: Bill Hayton’s The South China Sea: The Struggle for Power in Asia; Lyle Goldstein’s Meeting China Halfway: How to Defuse the Emerging U.S.-China Rivalry; or Edward N. Luttwak’s The Rise of China vs The Logic of Strategy.
As a closing remark, timing most likely meant Pilger had to force into his documentary a brief comment about Donald Trump. He says, “the new president Donald Trump has a problem with China. And the question is whether Trump will continue with the provocations included in this film and take us to war.” Well, this is quite a departure from Pilger’s earlier comments about the president-elect, most of which were evident at a speech he gave in March at the University of Sydney (an edited transcript can be found here).
All too happy to leap head-first down the rabbit hole of ‘the enemy of my enemy is a friend,’ he said that “[Trump] is certainly odious; but he is also a media hate figure. That alone should arouse our skepticism.” Next he tried comparing Trump to the former British Prime Minister David Cameron, without explaining how Cameron was as extreme on immigration as Trump, before calling Obama the “Great Deporter.” He then added that Trump is “a maverick. He says the invasion of Iraq was a crime; he doesn’t want to go to war with Russia and China. The danger to the rest of us is not Trump, but Hillary Clinton. She is no maverick. She embodies the resilience and violence of a system whose vaunted ‘exceptionalism’ is totalitarian with an occasional liberal face.”
Well, Pilger has now got his wish. His maverick is set to take charge. If the “totalitarian with an occasional liberal face” of Hilary Clinton is gone, then one can only suppose that Pilger is ecstatic that the ‘totalitarian with a permanent totalitarian face’ of China and Russia will now not be troubled by an isolationist president-elect.
http://thediplomat.com/2016/12/the-trouble-with-john-pilgers-the-coming-war-on-china/
The Trouble With John Pilger’s The Coming War on China
I was left feeling an odd mixture of sympathy and exasperation after enduring John Pilger’s latest documentary, The Coming War on China.
Despite the journalist’s long career of opposing tyranny, oppression, and dictatorship wherever he may find it, Pilger’s loathing of the United States has led him to produce a film that acts as an apology for Chinese totalitarianism, distorts the truth about Asian politics, and presents China as a passive victim in a potential new superpower war. Actually, my sympathy for his intellectual descent is less sincere than my anger; what I watched was an incendiary spectacle that manages to circle the triumvirate of narcissism, ignorance, and propaganda.
I must admit a few things first. Among others it was Pilger who first sparked my interest in journalism. He gave me a short interview I published in December 2014. Later, I interviewed him again for an article I wrote on the 40th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. Afterwards, however, we stopped conversing by email for a number of reasons.
Now, with personal reasons in light and with personal reasons aside, let me come to The Coming War on China, which was released at selected cinemas in Britain this month. First, the title had me concerned. “With” might have given the sense of shared responsibility for the possible war, but only an aggressor commits a war “on” another country. Pilger’s intellect cannot be doubted, so his semantic choice must have been intentional.
Much of the first 40 minutes of the 122 minute long documentary explores the United States’ destruction of Marshall Islands, used in the 1940s as a site for nuclear testing. It is upsetting and disturbing viewing, complete with the racist language of the 1940s and 1950s and the ease in which the people of the islands were exploited by the American government. It compares in effect to Pilger’s documentary on the destruction of the Chagos Islands, Stealing a Nation. A short part compares how the wealthy American expats live on the islands compared to the destitute locals, which is termed by Pilger as “apartheid in the Pacific.” Again, this is heartbreaking.
But, I found myself asking as the sequence ended, what does this have to do with the topic of the documentary: escalating tensions between the United States and China in the 21st century? Certainly what the United States did was a crime, but it was a crime committed decades ago. And except that the Marshall Islands are home to U.S. missile bases, there appears to be no other connection to the rest of the documentary.
The Coming War on China does not engage in lies but it evades the truth so much that it is rendered invisible. (One doesn’t know whether Pilger appreciates his thoughts are often verbatim to what regularly appears in Chinese state television, though he fails to include one single clip from this media instead relying on a montage of American news shows to indicate a warmongering United States.) If, according to Joseph Goebbels, by telling a lie enough times it becomes the truth, then the reverse is also true: by evading the truth enough times it becomes a lie.
This is what Pilger does throughout. For example, at the same time as the United States was tricking the people of the Marshall Islands back onto into highly contaminated and radiated homes, leaving many to die, the Communist Party of China was launching a nationwide campaign to suppress counter-revolutionaries. The official number of deaths when it came to an end was as high as 700,000, though some historians put it around the two million mark.
The latter is not mentioned by Pilger. In fact, even the casual viewer would probably notice that he fails to mention any of the crimes committed by the CPC – even a visit to the party’s museum warrants no reference to these. For example, he mentions the Cultural Revolution in passing but doesn’t provide the unwitting viewer with the fact that as many as 30 million people died during these eleven years. He only says it gave way to “silence,” a most cruel euphemism. Indeed, Pilger is at his worst when he speaks with euphemisms, with the figurative raising of the eyebrow.
Aside from the euphemism is the outright contradiction. For example, in direct contrast to the wealth of the Americans being critiqued in the Marshall Islands – and paired with America’s predatory capitalism of his earlier documentaries – the wealth of the Chinese is something Pilger doesn’t challenge. He listens without comment as he is told that China now has more billionaires than the United States. Upon making a return to China for the first time in decades (perhaps that’s the reason why he hardly mentions the country and never leaves the city to explore the countryside) he says that “coming back the change is barely comprehensible. Here in Shanghai the freedom bears no comparison.” He goes on: “Yes, there are issues with human rights, especially the right to speak against the state and challenge its power. Since I was last here, millions of people have been lifted out of poverty, many into a new middle class.”
He suggests that this growth of the middle class has been overlooked in the West or, perhaps, “willfully misunderstood” (This is not the first time Pilger has talked down to other journalists for not noting what he has seen). And then he suggests that since China has matched the United States at its own game of capitalism, it is “unforgivable,” supposedly, to the United States.
In a long article for the New Internationalist, published this month, Pilger does at least mention that inequality is rising and protests are taking place but goes on to say that “for all the difficulties of those left behind by China’s rapid growth… what is striking is the widespread sense of optimism that buttresses the epic of change.” Where is the interest in the millions of Chinese suffering in the ilk of his 2001 documentary The New Rulers Of The World, which deplored Asia becoming the workhouse of the world and its cheap laborers the greatest export?
Perhaps the most illustrative part of this documentary is the relatively short time he spends in China. There, he interviews Zhang Weiwei, the former advisor to Deng Xiaoping, who describes the former premier as a “visionary” and goes on criticize the BBC and other Western media for mentioning in their news reports that China has a communist party and is an autocracy, and dismisses these as just labels, which Pilger doesn’t respond to. “If you watch BBC or CNN or read the Economist,” Zhang says, “and try to understand China, it will be a failure.” Again, no rebuttal from Pilger.
Then to Eric Li, a man Pilger describes as an entrepreneur and one of the confident political class. “In China there are a lot of problems,” Li says. “But at the moment, the Party state has proven an extraordinary ability to change.” He goes on to say that the reforms of the last 60 years are broader and greater than any other country in modern history. Pilger doesn’t ask whether these reforms were wanted by the people.
He then talks to Lijia Zhang, a Beijing-based journalist who published the best-selling book, ironically titled Socialism Is Great! “Many Americans imagine,” she says, “that Chinese people live a miserable, repressed life with no freedom whatsoever. That’s not true.” She says that if you talk to Chinese people (queue videos of smiling people) they will tell you that they are happy.
Amid all of this, Pilger does at least ask the question of exploitation of poor people as the principle creator of wealth. Zhang palms him off, saying that if you go and talk to the poor, the internal migrant workers, “you will be surprised that they have experienced greater increase in income than any other social groups.” Pilger does go to the poor but for less than a few minutes, simply showing their impoverished homes.
He asks Zhang about Tiananmen Square, saying the demonstrators fought for democratic change in China. “It was more than a tragedy, it was a massacre,” Pilger states, “of which the memory remains a raw presence in China.” He then asks Zhang: why does the Chinese state still fear “the few that speak out? He then informs the viewer about Liu Xiaobo, and listens as Zhang accuses the Nobel Peace Prize committee of making a “mistake” in naming Liu as a winner. “And yet in China today the spirit of protest lives on in different forms,” Pilger finishes.
All in all, Pilger’s exploration of the modern-day problems of China lasts from the 55th minute until 66th, much of which is given over to optimistic interviews with Chinese commentators and former government officials, who downplay the crimes of the government. One might say, well, at least Pilger does at least consider the democratic and human rights of more than one billion people.
But wait. The next section, called “Resistance,” which spans from the 66th minute until the 92nd, is dedicated to the actions of islanders in Japan and South Korea fighting against U.S. military bases – in South Korea, this takes the form of a dozen Catholics and two Quakers. Of course, the islanders’ fight is a noble one and they deserve attention. However, what is one to read from Pilger dedicating just 11 minutes to the fight of a billion people for democracy, human rights, and some autonomy from a country that happens to be the focus of the documentary, and 26 minutes to a small number of people in Japan and South Korea fighting against military bases?
Pilger begins the documentary by saying it is “a film about the human spirit, and about the rise of an extraordinary resistance.” But where is the extraordinary resistance mounted against China’s foreign endeavors? Why does he not mention the resistance of the Burmese against the Myitsone Dam? Or the Lao people to stop much of the country’s north being sold for cheap to Chinese businessmen? Or, for that matter, the Lao who demonstrated against their government after China decided to build dozens of dams in the country that will destroy most of the Mekong River? Or, even give one sentence over to the anti-Chinese protests in Vietnam? It is a shame Pilger does not even mention these, or that Myanmar is now a democratic country while China was happy to allow its murderous military junta to try to create a nation of slaves.
Pilger consistently glosses over China’s past crimes while dwelling on America’s. He doesn’t mention that it was China that kept the Khmer Rouge in AK-47s, preventing Cambodia for returning to peace until almost two decades after the genocidal regime was overthrown in 1979. Neither does he ever mention Tibet or the Chinese role in the Vietnam War, and its continuing propping up of North Korea. Neither does he consider China’s actions in the South China Sea in more than a passing reference. Neither, for one moment, does he consider China’s economic actions abroad in the negative. Quite the opposite, in fact. In his New Internationalist article, he lauds China’s “New Silk Road,” saying that it “has the approval of much of humanity,” adding, with a sense of anti-West triumphalism, that “along the way, [it] is uniting China and Russia; and they are doing it entirely without ‘us’ in the West.” (This goes against the noble forms of resistance against Chinese capital abroad I mentioned above).
Indeed, he never considers this to be a Chinese form of globalization and, dare I say, economic imperialism – one of the world’s last Marxist-Leninist countries must have purged Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism from its reading list. “The initiative is a timely reminder that China under the Communist Party is building a new empire,” Friedrich Wu, a professor at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, told the Financial Times last year. How can Pilger sit back and applaud the so-called “Beijing Consensus,” which exports the worse of globalization to the world – the rise of predatory capitalism without the expectation for countries to develop democratically?
Pilger’s scattershots do not cohere to a conclusion; they only seek to confirm to his narrative. His anti-Americanism blurs all. In journalism circles, one could say he is not being objective. This is not necessarily a bad thing: one enjoys a good deal of subjectivity in reporting. But Pilger takes this to the extreme.
It is only in the last 30 minutes that the viewer actually gets to hear anything about the coming war. Though, 30 minutes is far too long. Indeed, this 122 minute documentary only makes a few boilerplate points: U.S. military bases “encircle” China, Obama has spent more on nuclear weapons than any other president, and U.S. military officials tend to speak in a gung-ho fashion about war. Here, I agree with Pilger. The United States has built bases that surround China, the outgoing administration is spending more on nuclear weapons than predecessors, and military officials aren’t the most softly-spoken people in front of cameras. But that doesn’t mean the United States is containing China or encircling it or, worse, threatening it.
Pilger tends to see coincidence as correlation. Since China is building its army at the same time as the United States tries to reassert authority in Asia, the former must be a result of the latter. That the United States has bases in much of the Pacific must mean it is on the war path. Yet, he never mentions the rise of Chinese nationalism under President Xi Jinping. As other leaders before Xi have learned, nationalism can be relied upon when other forms of legitimacy disappear. (In a speech in November 2013, Xi reiterated his goals of “the great revival of the Chinese nation.”)
Neither does Pilger look into military spending by China, which has been constant since 1994, according to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. In 1994, military expenditure was 1.7 percent of GDP, rising to 2.2 percent in 2001, and falling to 1.9 percent in 2015. In fact, as a percentage of government spending, military expenditure was more than double its 2015 value in 1994 (6.3 percent in 2015, compared to 14.4 percent in 1994). This precedes the United States’ “pivot to Asia” by more than a decade. Lastly, Pilger never inquires into whether other countries in the region might actually take the United States’ side on the issue, or, for that matter, why the countries now lining up behind China – Cambodia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Russia, and so on – tend to be either autocratic, partly democratic, or under the guardianship of populists with dictatorial-leanings. Without reference to these, his narrative tumbles into a dangerous excuse, or propaganda, for the Chinese state.
Worse, he sees any country allied with the United States as a warmonger. While exploring opposition to U.S. bases in Japan, he criticizes the country’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, whose American “patron” has helped stoke Japanese nationalism and to reassert Japanese power. He does the same for South Korea. Just perhaps, however, the Japanese and South Korean governments are reacting to Chinese assertive actions rather than being belligerent on their own accord. As I was told last year by the journalist Bill Hayton, author of The South China Sea: The Struggle for Power in Asia, “the U.S. hasn’t been forcing these countries to ask it to send military equipment and ships. These countries are nervous and are asking the U.S. for reassurance because they perceive a threat from China.”
A fallacy arises here. Pilger descends into the myth that the United States is all powerful – the repeated use of an image of military bases around the world seeks to convey this. Yet, if its power and warmongering attitude were true, then why, one can ask, hasn’t the United States gone to war with China already? Presumably, a conflict-craving nation wouldn’t allow China to build up its nuclear and military capabilities before attacking. The fact that China now has the world’s second largest expenditure on its military, after the United States, would actually deter the latter from attacking, one might assume.
A more nuanced understanding of the situation would be to admit that both the United States and China are engaging in actions that could run the risk of sparking a new superpower war. More serious articles and books have explored the duality of the situation, treating both the United States and China as equal players, and I would recommend any of the following before watching one minute of The Coming War on China: Bill Hayton’s The South China Sea: The Struggle for Power in Asia; Lyle Goldstein’s Meeting China Halfway: How to Defuse the Emerging U.S.-China Rivalry; or Edward N. Luttwak’s The Rise of China vs The Logic of Strategy.
As a closing remark, timing most likely meant Pilger had to force into his documentary a brief comment about Donald Trump. He says, “the new president Donald Trump has a problem with China. And the question is whether Trump will continue with the provocations included in this film and take us to war.” Well, this is quite a departure from Pilger’s earlier comments about the president-elect, most of which were evident at a speech he gave in March at the University of Sydney (an edited transcript can be found here).
All too happy to leap head-first down the rabbit hole of ‘the enemy of my enemy is a friend,’ he said that “[Trump] is certainly odious; but he is also a media hate figure. That alone should arouse our skepticism.” Next he tried comparing Trump to the former British Prime Minister David Cameron, without explaining how Cameron was as extreme on immigration as Trump, before calling Obama the “Great Deporter.” He then added that Trump is “a maverick. He says the invasion of Iraq was a crime; he doesn’t want to go to war with Russia and China. The danger to the rest of us is not Trump, but Hillary Clinton. She is no maverick. She embodies the resilience and violence of a system whose vaunted ‘exceptionalism’ is totalitarian with an occasional liberal face.”
Well, Pilger has now got his wish. His maverick is set to take charge. If the “totalitarian with an occasional liberal face” of Hilary Clinton is gone, then one can only suppose that Pilger is ecstatic that the ‘totalitarian with a permanent totalitarian face’ of China and Russia will now not be troubled by an isolationist president-elect.
http://thediplomat.com/2016/12/the-trouble-with-john-pilgers-the-coming-war-on-china/
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The Trouble With John Pilger’s The Coming War on China
I was left feeling an odd mixture of sympathy and exasperation after enduring John Pilger’s latest documentary, The Coming War on China.
Despite the journalist’s long career of opposing tyranny, oppression, and dictatorship wherever he may find it, Pilger’s loathing of the United States has led him to produce a film that acts as an apology for Chinese totalitarianism, distorts the truth about Asian politics, and presents China as a passive victim in a potential new superpower war. Actually, my sympathy for his intellectual descent is less sincere than my anger; what I watched was an incendiary spectacle that manages to circle the triumvirate of narcissism, ignorance, and propaganda.
I was left feeling an odd mixture of exasperation and anger after enduring David Hutt's criticism to John Pilger’s latest documentary, The Coming War on China. The Diplomat's Southeast Asia columnist stationed in Cambodia seems to be very good at artfully and selectively presenting the many half-baked "facts" then twisting and spinning off words, should be no wonder knowing his profession as a "journalist".
I must admit a few things first. Among others it was Pilger who first sparked my interest in journalism. He gave me a short interview I published in December 2014. Later, I interviewed him again for an article I wrote on the 40th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. Afterwards, however, we stopped conversing by email for a number of reasons.
This article sparked my further interest to dig deeper what's The Diplomat magazine and online publication.
The Diplomat Magazine
"Diplomat Media Pty Ltd is the publisher of the current affairs magazine The Diplomat: Australia's Window on the World. Although Australian based, The Diplomat has a long record of citations in the international media including, The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, The Times, as well as newspapers across Asia and the Middle East." [1]
Their website provides links to only the following think tanks (most of which are right wing):
The original link of "About Us" quoted by SourceWatch is: http://www.the-diplomat.com/default.asp?page=aboutUs
However the link was broken, "Page not found", was already revamped totally, replaced by this one: http://thediplomat.com/the-diplomat/
now the "About Us" page is quite leaned, all links to those think tanks were removed.
Nonetheless one can still read back the earlier "About Us" content as archived by Wayback Machine many years ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20060821010511/http://www.the-diplomat.com/default.asp?page=aboutUs
Now, with personal reasons in light and with personal reasons aside, let me come to The Coming War on China, which was released at selected cinemas in Britain this month. First, the title had me concerned. “With” might have given the sense of shared responsibility for the possible war, but only an aggressor commits a war “on” another country. Pilger’s intellect cannot be doubted, so his semantic choice must have been intentional.
Much of the first 40 minutes of the 122 minute long documentary explores the United States’ destruction of Marshall Islands, used in the 1940s as a site for nuclear testing. It is upsetting and disturbing viewing, complete with the racist language of the 1940s and 1950s and the ease in which the people of the islands were exploited by the American government. It compares in effect to Pilger’s documentary on the destruction of the Chagos Islands, Stealing a Nation. A short part compares how the wealthy American expats live on the islands compared to the destitute locals, which is termed by Pilger as “apartheid in the Pacific.” Again, this is heartbreaking.
But, I found myself asking as the sequence ended, what does this have to do with the topic of the documentary: escalating tensions between the United States and China in the 21st century? Certainly what the United States did was a crime, but it was a crime committed decades ago. And except that the Marshall Islands are home to U.S. missile bases, there appears to be no other connection to the rest of the documentary.
My question to the author, David Hutt, should John Pilger tabulated all the United States crimes around the world, something like Steve Kangas did in his article "A Timeline of CIA Atrocities" ?
"The following timeline describes just a few of the hundreds of atrocities and crimes committed by the CIA. (1)
CIA operations follow the same recurring script. First, American business interests abroad are threatened by a popular or democratically elected leader. The people support their leader because he intends to conduct land reform, strengthen unions, redistribute wealth, nationalize foreign-owned industry, and regulate business to protect workers, consumers and the environment. So, on behalf of American business, and often with their help, the CIA mobilizes the opposition. First it identifies right-wing groups within the country (usually the military), and offers them a deal: "We'll put you in power if you maintain a favorable business climate for us." The Agency then hires, trains and works with them to overthrow the existing government (usually a democracy). It uses every trick in the book: propaganda, stuffed ballot boxes, purchased elections, extortion, blackmail, sexual intrigue, false stories about opponents in the local media, infiltration and disruption of opposing political parties, kidnapping, beating, torture, intimidation, economic sabotage, death squads and even assassination. These efforts culminate in a military coup, which installs a right-wing dictator. The CIA trains the dictator’s security apparatus to crack down on the traditional enemies of big business, using interrogation, torture and murder. The victims are said to be "communists," but almost always they are just peasants, liberals, moderates, labor union leaders, political opponents and advocates of free speech and democracy. Widespread human rights abuses follow.
This scenario has been repeated so many times that the CIA actually teaches it in a special school, the notorious "School of the Americas." (It opened in Panama but later moved to Fort Benning, Georgia.) Critics have nicknamed it the "School of the Dictators" and "School of the Assassins." Here, the CIA trains Latin American military officers how to conduct coups, including the use of interrogation, torture and murder.
The Association for Responsible Dissent estimates that by 1987, 6 million people had died as a result of CIA covert operations. (2) Former State Department official William Blum correctly calls this an "American Holocaust."
The CIA justifies these actions as part of its war against communism. But most coups do not involve a communist threat. Unlucky nations are targeted for a wide variety of reasons: not only threats to American business interests abroad, but also liberal or even moderate social reforms, political instability, the unwillingness of a leader to carry out Washington’s dictates, and declarations of neutrality in the Cold War. Indeed, nothing has infuriated CIA Directors quite like a nation’s desire to stay out of the Cold War.
The ironic thing about all this intervention is that it frequently fails to achieve American objectives. Often the newly installed dictator grows comfortable with the security apparatus the CIA has built for him. He becomes an expert at running a police state. And because the dictator knows he cannot be overthrown, he becomes independent and defiant of Washington's will. The CIA then finds it cannot overthrow him, because the police and military are under the dictator's control, afraid to cooperate with American spies for fear of torture and execution. The only two options for the U.S at this point are impotence or war. Examples of this "boomerang effect" include the Shah of Iran, General Noriega and Saddam Hussein. The boomerang effect also explains why the CIA has proven highly successful at overthrowing democracies, but a wretched failure at overthrowing dictatorships.
The following timeline should confirm that the CIA as we know it should be abolished and replaced by a true information-gathering and analysis organization. The CIA cannot be reformed — it is institutionally and culturally corrupt."
[...]
Endnotes:
1. All history concerning CIA intervention in foreign countries is summarized from William Blum’s encyclopedic work, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995). Sources for domestic CIA operations come from Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen’s The 60 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1997).
2. Coleman McCarthy, "The Consequences of Covert Tactics" Washington Post, December 13, 1987.
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/CIAtimeline.html
Or... General Wesley Clark - "Take out 7 countries in 5 years"
Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Iran.
How about the last decade destructions of Libya and Syria?
The Coming War on China does not engage in lies but it evades the truth so much that it is rendered invisible. (One doesn’t know whether Pilger appreciates his thoughts are often verbatim to what regularly appears in Chinese state television, though he fails to include one single clip from this media instead relying on a montage of American news shows to indicate a warmongering United States.) If, according to Joseph Goebbels, by telling a lie enough times it becomes the truth, then the reverse is also true: by evading the truth enough times it becomes a lie.
I beg your pardon: Warmongering China? Warmongering USA? Please, which one is fact, the truth, which one is fiction? Do you need any more hard facts, Mr. Hutt???
And who has all the overseas military bases encircling other countries???
Mapping United States Military Installations
http://empire.is/
This is what Pilger does throughout. For example, at the same time as the United States was tricking the people of the Marshall Islands back onto into highly contaminated and radiated homes, leaving many to die, the Communist Party of China was launching a nationwide campaign to suppress counter-revolutionaries. The official number of deaths when it came to an end was as high as 700,000, though some historians put it around the two million mark.
"Counter-revolutionary suppression"? Which historical occurrence did you mean, David Hutt?
The latter is not mentioned by Pilger. In fact, even the casual viewer would probably notice that he fails to mention any of the crimes committed by the CPC – even a visit to the party’s museum warrants no reference to these. For example, he mentions the Cultural Revolution in passing but doesn’t provide the unwitting viewer with the fact that as many as 30 million people died during these eleven years. He only says it gave way to “silence,” a most cruel euphemism. Indeed, Pilger is at his worst when he speaks with euphemisms, with the figurative raising of the eyebrow.
With regard to the "Cultural Revolution", which was preceded by the failed "Great Leap Forward" industrialization initiatives, here are few well-written related articles to ponder:
Did Millions Die in the Great Leap Forward: A Quick Note on the Underlying Statistics - Part 1
https://blog.hiddenharmonies.org/20...rd-a-quick-note-on-the-underlying-statistics/
Did Millions Die in the Great Leap Forward: A Quick Note on non-Contemporaneous Data - Part 2
https://blog.hiddenharmonies.org/20...ard-a-quick-note-on-non-contemporaneous-data/
Another Look at the Great Leap Forward
https://blog.hiddenharmonies.org/2013/01/17/another-look-at-the-great-leap-forward/
A Conversation with Boi Boi Huong on the Great Leap Forward
Recently I had a chance to speak with Boi Boi Huong (mp3, audio play link below). Her family emigrated to Holland from Vietnam when she was young. While in college, she took a stronger interest in China, and in fact completing her thesis on the Great Leap Forward. The timing of her work was interesting, because this had been just couple of years following 1989. Western academia and press at that time were especially hostile to China and China’s political system. The Great Leap Forward has always being used in the Western press and academia to vilify Mao Zedong and his policies, especially with the millions of deaths coinciding that period. Once Huong found out a bit about the circumstances of that period, she was able to quickly figure out the dominant narratives in the West were flawed. (Make sure to also read Ray‘s excellent post, “Another Look at the Great Leap Forward” and Allen‘s robust analysis of the death numbers, “Did Millions Die in the Great Leap Forward: A Quick Note on the Underlying Statistics.”)
To the Chinese, Mao was a symbol of modern China. Under his leadership, ordinary Chinese were finally freed from imperialism, invasions, and centuries of miserable life. Mao is more than the mere mistakes he has committed. Nor is he any of that exaggerated sins pinned against him in the West.
http://blog.hiddenharmonies.org/2013/04/22/a-conversation-with-boi-boi-huong-on-the-great-leap-forward/
Aside from the euphemism is the outright contradiction. For example, in direct contrast to the wealth of the Americans being critiqued in the Marshall Islands – and paired with America’s predatory capitalism of his earlier documentaries – the wealth of the Chinese is something Pilger doesn’t challenge. He listens without comment as he is told that China now has more billionaires than the United States. Upon making a return to China for the first time in decades (perhaps that’s the reason why he hardly mentions the country and never leaves the city to explore the countryside) he says that “coming back the change is barely comprehensible. Here in Shanghai the freedom bears no comparison.” He goes on: “Yes, there are issues with human rights, especially the right to speak against the state and challenge its power. Since I was last here, millions of people have been lifted out of poverty, many into a new middle class.”
He suggests that this growth of the middle class has been overlooked in the West or, perhaps, “willfully misunderstood” (This is not the first time Pilger has talked down to other journalists for not noting what he has seen). And then he suggests that since China has matched the United States at its own game of capitalism, it is “unforgivable,” supposedly, to the United States.
In a long article for the New Internationalist, published this month, Pilger does at least mention that inequality is rising and protests are taking place but goes on to say that “for all the difficulties of those left behind by China’s rapid growth… what is striking is the widespread sense of optimism that buttresses the epic of change.” Where is the interest in the millions of Chinese suffering in the ilk of his 2001 documentary The New Rulers Of The World, which deplored Asia becoming the workhouse of the world and its cheap laborers the greatest export?
And the author just ignored the hard facts:
Population scale: China has 1,386 millions vs USA has 326 millions... so if there are millions or even tens of millions left behind not enjoying much of the "economical cakes" in China, what to wonder then? Its size is simply gigantic, "unpresidented" in the mankind development. If one really wanna compare apple to apple, he can only honestly and meaningfully compare China to India as the sole two nations on earth having populations ever exceeding the 1,000,000,000 threshold throughout human history!
GeoHive - Current World Population
http://www.geohive.com/earth/population_now.aspx
And does the USA really have the better wealth distribution among its population? Because I understand that the world's richest individuals are Americans.
More accurate statistics by John Williams
http://www.shadowstats.com/
And the author should not forget, it is not as if China also owns the "World Reserve Currency", USD, "printers" so it can print conveniently to hand out the many welfare allowances to the many millions of its citizens through the SNAP/EBT/Food stamps and several other welfare hand-outs, it's estimated that about 1/6 of the US population depend on these welfare programs for living.
Perhaps the most illustrative part of this documentary is the relatively short time he spends in China. There, he interviews Zhang Weiwei, the former advisor to Deng Xiaoping, who describes the former premier as a “visionary” and goes on criticize the BBC and other Western media for mentioning in their news reports that China has a communist party and is an autocracy, and dismisses these as just labels, which Pilger doesn’t respond to. “If you watch BBC or CNN or read the Economist,” Zhang says, “and try to understand China, it will be a failure.” Again, no rebuttal from Pilger.
Should Hutt be reminded that even Donald Trump does think so?
Fake News© manufacturers, incl. the world largest ones
While the Communist China is a pretty clear labeling right instantly, the more surreptitious arms of the media tentacles owned and controlled by the few hands in the West are hardly noticeable, except to those who are willing to dive in and dig much deeper!
Six Companies Control 96% of the World’s Media (2015-10-17) | Tapnewswire
The most part of the public audience worldwide are NOT QUITE AWARE of the nearly total domination of the media business, information feeds and worldwide dissemination including all means of information mediums, almost everything you WATCH, SEE, HEAR and READ... are basically owned and controlled by the mere SIX COMPANIES CONTROL 96% of the WORLD'S MEDIA : 1) AOL TIME WARNER 2) THE WALT DISNEY CORPORATION 3) BERTELSMANN AG 4) VIACOM 5) NEWS CORPORATION 6) VIVENDI UNIVERSAL
The nearly total media domination by the very few hands: "Six Companies Control 96% Of The World's Media" published in October 2015, and many more references that can be found in the internet realm.
Through these SIX GIANT HOLDINGS they control over 1,500++ media corporations in various forms of news and entertainment channels and publications.
Then to Eric Li, a man Pilger describes as an entrepreneur and one of the confident political class. “In China there are a lot of problems,” Li says. “But at the moment, the Party state has proven an extraordinary ability to change.” He goes on to say that the reforms of the last 60 years are broader and greater than any other country in modern history. Pilger doesn’t ask whether these reforms were wanted by the people.
How many Chinese people should Pilger ask for? How many millions to make it conclusive? Or... how many hundreds of millions???
One thing that westerners can hardly understand is that the importance of any individual can NOT exceed the importance of the many... of the society... of the public... let alone the interests of a nation!!!
David Hutt should have watched Eric Li's 20-minute presentation video: "Eric X. Li: A tale of two political systems" at below, it's presented before the American audience.
He then talks to Lijia Zhang, a Beijing-based journalist who published the best-selling book, ironically titled Socialism Is Great! “Many Americans imagine,” she says, “that Chinese people live a miserable, repressed life with no freedom whatsoever. That’s not true.” She says that if you talk to Chinese people (queue videos of smiling people) they will tell you that they are happy.
Amid all of this, Pilger does at least ask the question of exploitation of poor people as the principle creator of wealth. Zhang palms him off, saying that if you go and talk to the poor, the internal migrant workers, “you will be surprised that they have experienced greater increase in income than any other social groups.” Pilger does go to the poor but for less than a few minutes, simply showing their impoverished homes.
Again, since China has the gigantic population, of course it still has many poor people. For apple to apple comparison, then Hutt must see the world's largest democratic nation.
He asks Zhang about Tiananmen Square, saying the demonstrators fought for democratic change in China. “It was more than a tragedy, it was a massacre,” Pilger states, “of which the memory remains a raw presence in China.” He then asks Zhang: why does the Chinese state still fear “the few that speak out? He then informs the viewer about Liu Xiaobo, and listens as Zhang accuses the Nobel Peace Prize committee of making a “mistake” in naming Liu as a winner. “And yet in China today the spirit of protest lives on in different forms,” Pilger finishes.
"Tian Anmen Square"? I understand that David may surely prefer to see a Yugoslavia or USSR-style of break-up upon China, thus all his concerns or exasperation today won't be any more relevant.
Or some more subtleties in depicting the mental picture as expressed by following article:
The Nine Nations of China - The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/11/the-nine-nations-of-china/307769/
And at the author's own blog - Patrick Chovanec:
https://chovanec.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/the-nine-nations-of-china/
Or, the less subtle ideas by those foreign forces to carve out China into many smaller parts and only by the "historical miracle" or destined narrow escape, such break-up was denied by the break-out of the World War I in Europe. I once read such exposition but can't locate the right link, but even reading the controlled exposition of history of Shanghai at Wikipedia may still provide some understanding of this matter to some extent:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Shanghai
Search for "Imperialism in China: China's Century of Humiliation" and read on... books, presentations, web links... plenty
Colonial Powers Carve Up China, 1850-1910
All in all, Pilger’s exploration of the modern-day problems of China lasts from the 55th minute until 66th, much of which is given over to optimistic interviews with Chinese commentators and former government officials, who downplay the crimes of the government. One might say, well, at least Pilger does at least consider the democratic and human rights of more than one billion people.
Ha ha... you don't feed the billions of people and make them prosperous with the much politicized notions of "democratic and human rights" ... again, just look at the living conditions of "the world's largest democratic nation"! Hutt makes it as if the much touted value of "democratic and human rights" a kind of elixir that will cure the world's problems and make nations prosperous and harmonious. What a false reference!
But wait. The next section, called “Resistance,” which spans from the 66th minute until the 92nd, is dedicated to the actions of islanders in Japan and South Korea fighting against U.S. military bases – in South Korea, this takes the form of a dozen Catholics and two Quakers. Of course, the islanders’ fight is a noble one and they deserve attention. However, what is one to read from Pilger dedicating just 11 minutes to the fight of a billion people for democracy, human rights, and some autonomy from a country that happens to be the focus of the documentary, and 26 minutes to a small number of people in Japan and South Korea fighting against military bases?
Pilger begins the documentary by saying it is “a film about the human spirit, and about the rise of an extraordinary resistance.” But where is the extraordinary resistance mounted against China’s foreign endeavors? Why does he not mention the resistance of the Burmese against the Myitsone Dam? Or the Lao people to stop much of the country’s north being sold for cheap to Chinese businessmen? Or, for that matter, the Lao who demonstrated against their government after China decided to build dozens of dams in the country that will destroy most of the Mekong River? Or, even give one sentence over to the anti-Chinese protests in Vietnam? It is a shame Pilger does not even mention these, or that Myanmar is now a democratic country while China was happy to allow its murderous military junta to try to create a nation of slaves.
And WHY NO mentioning about the operations of many NGOs funded by George Soros' Open Society Foundation (OSF), National Endowment for Democracy (NED); and many other troublemaker incubating organizations there? And why not blame on China either for Aung San Suu Kyi's policies on Rohingya crisis in Myanmar?
Pilger consistently glosses over China’s past crimes while dwelling on America’s. He doesn’t mention that it was China that kept the Khmer Rouge in AK-47s, preventing Cambodia for returning to peace until almost two decades after the genocidal regime was overthrown in 1979. Neither does he ever mention Tibet or the Chinese role in the Vietnam War, and its continuing propping up of North Korea. Neither does he consider China’s actions in the South China Sea in more than a passing reference. Neither, for one moment, does he consider China’s economic actions abroad in the negative. Quite the opposite, in fact. In his New Internationalist article, he lauds China’s “New Silk Road,” saying that it “has the approval of much of humanity,” adding, with a sense of anti-West triumphalism, that “along the way, [it] is uniting China and Russia; and they are doing it entirely without ‘us’ in the West.” (This goes against the noble forms of resistance against Chinese capital abroad I mentioned above).
The author should have cursed that the Kangaroo Court of the International Tribunal Panel in Haque, a 3-person panel has no measurable effects on the South China Sea development. As well as China's immense and real investments in the economic cooperation and joint development with the Continent of Africa. Btw he missed out Xinjiang when he took Tibet in his artful representation
Indeed, he never considers this to be a Chinese form of globalization and, dare I say, economic imperialism – one of the world’s last Marxist-Leninist countries must have purged Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism from its reading list. “The initiative is a timely reminder that China under the Communist Party is building a new empire,” Friedrich Wu, a professor at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, told the Financial Times last year. How can Pilger sit back and applaud the so-called “Beijing Consensus,” which exports the worse of globalization to the world – the rise of predatory capitalism without the expectation for countries to develop democratically?
I ain't sure about "countries to develop democratically" (again, look at the largest democratic nation on earth) but I am pretty sure about countries to develop their economies and infrastructures thus improve people's livelihood in economic cooperation with China. And he missed out to expound the global weaponry exports by the western MIC and their "miraculous" devastating effects. Is it a preferred mutually beneficial trade/commerce/economy relationship?
For sure David Hutt emphasized too much the over idealized conceptual glories of "democracy and human rights" from his repeatedly articulated ideas, as if setting them as the final objectives themselves instead of just one of the means to achieve better life for the people that he ignored the utmost importance of people's real lives and the true fulfillment of the life necessities, while a prosperous and harmonious society may be beyond his comprehension.... or he is simply dishonest towards the world's real situation!
Pilger’s scattershots do not cohere to a conclusion; they only seek to confirm to his narrative. His anti-Americanism blurs all. In journalism circles, one could say he is not being objective. This is not necessarily a bad thing: one enjoys a good deal of subjectivity in reporting. But Pilger takes this to the extreme.
It is only in the last 30 minutes that the viewer actually gets to hear anything about the coming war. Though, 30 minutes is far too long. Indeed, this 122 minute documentary only makes a few boilerplate points: U.S. military bases “encircle” China, Obama has spent more on nuclear weapons than any other president, and U.S. military officials tend to speak in a gung-ho fashion about war. Here, I agree with Pilger. The United States has built bases that surround China, the outgoing administration is spending more on nuclear weapons than predecessors, and military officials aren’t the most softly-spoken people in front of cameras. But that doesn’t mean the United States is containing China or encircling it or, worse, threatening it.
Pilger tends to see coincidence as correlation. Since China is building its army at the same time as the United States tries to reassert authority in Asia, the former must be a result of the latter. That the United States has bases in much of the Pacific must mean it is on the war path. Yet, he never mentions the rise of Chinese nationalism under President Xi Jinping. As other leaders before Xi have learned, nationalism can be relied upon when other forms of legitimacy disappear. (In a speech in November 2013, Xi reiterated his goals of “the great revival of the Chinese nation.”)
Neither does Pilger look into military spending by China, which has been constant since 1994, according to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. In 1994, military expenditure was 1.7 percent of GDP, rising to 2.2 percent in 2001, and falling to 1.9 percent in 2015. In fact, as a percentage of government spending, military expenditure was more than double its 2015 value in 1994 (6.3 percent in 2015, compared to 14.4 percent in 1994). This precedes the United States’ “pivot to Asia” by more than a decade. Lastly, Pilger never inquires into whether other countries in the region might actually take the United States’ side on the issue, or, for that matter, why the countries now lining up behind China – Cambodia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Russia, and so on – tend to be either autocratic, partly democratic, or under the guardianship of populists with dictatorial-leanings. Without reference to these, his narrative tumbles into a dangerous excuse, or propaganda, for the Chinese state.
Military spending??? Not again! What a farcical notion. The USA has bigger offense spending than the sum up of the next 6 largest nations or so. Ha ha ha
Worse, he sees any country allied with the United States as a warmonger. While exploring opposition to U.S. bases in Japan, he criticizes the country’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, whose American “patron” has helped stoke Japanese nationalism and to reassert Japanese power. He does the same for South Korea. Just perhaps, however, the Japanese and South Korean governments are reacting to Chinese assertive actions rather than being belligerent on their own accord. As I was told last year by the journalist Bill Hayton, author of The South China Sea: The Struggle for Power in Asia, “the U.S. hasn’t been forcing these countries to ask it to send military equipment and ships. These countries are nervous and are asking the U.S. for reassurance because they perceive a threat from China.”
A fallacy arises here. Pilger descends into the myth that the United States is all powerful – the repeated use of an image of military bases around the world seeks to convey this. Yet, if its power and warmongering attitude were true, then why, one can ask, hasn’t the United States gone to war with China already? Presumably, a conflict-craving nation wouldn’t allow China to build up its nuclear and military capabilities before attacking. The fact that China now has the world’s second largest expenditure on its military, after the United States, would actually deter the latter from attacking, one might assume.
A more nuanced understanding of the situation would be to admit that both the United States and China are engaging in actions that could run the risk of sparking a new superpower war. More serious articles and books have explored the duality of the situation, treating both the United States and China as equal players, and I would recommend any of the following before watching one minute of The Coming War on China: Bill Hayton’s The South China Sea: The Struggle for Power in Asia; Lyle Goldstein’s Meeting China Halfway: How to Defuse the Emerging U.S.-China Rivalry; or Edward N. Luttwak’s The Rise of China vs The Logic of Strategy.
As a closing remark, timing most likely meant Pilger had to force into his documentary a brief comment about Donald Trump. He says, “the new president Donald Trump has a problem with China. And the question is whether Trump will continue with the provocations included in this film and take us to war.” Well, this is quite a departure from Pilger’s earlier comments about the president-elect, most of which were evident at a speech he gave in March at the University of Sydney (an edited transcript can be found here).
All too happy to leap head-first down the rabbit hole of ‘the enemy of my enemy is a friend,’ he said that “[Trump] is certainly odious; but he is also a media hate figure. That alone should arouse our skepticism.” Next he tried comparing Trump to the former British Prime Minister David Cameron, without explaining how Cameron was as extreme on immigration as Trump, before calling Obama the “Great Deporter.” He then added that Trump is “a maverick. He says the invasion of Iraq was a crime; he doesn’t want to go to war with Russia and China. The danger to the rest of us is not Trump, but Hillary Clinton. She is no maverick. She embodies the resilience and violence of a system whose vaunted ‘exceptionalism’ is totalitarian with an occasional liberal face.”
Well, Pilger has now got his wish. His maverick is set to take charge. If the “totalitarian with an occasional liberal face” of Hilary Clinton is gone, then one can only suppose that Pilger is ecstatic that the ‘totalitarian with a permanent totalitarian face’ of China and Russia will now not be troubled by an isolationist president-elect.
Just to conclude (skipping some parts of this lengthy article, may others please add up), whatever skirmish China may have domestically or even the civil war among the Chinese people (like the CCP vs KMT), it threatens none the world and during the most of its very long history it mostly falls into the pathetic victim of the foreign invaders and interventions. It's a terribly painful historical curses and dooms that should be prevented for good and at any price!
Finally, a revisit about the economic achievement, following article and charts are worth to read.
Share of world GDP throughout history
https://infogr.am/Share-of-world-GDP-throughout-history
Since 1AD until today the world's changed quite a lot. But until 1700AD the balance of wealth hadn't. For the past two centuries the share of the world's GDP has shifted to the west to Europe through imperialism, and technological innovation. With the rise of China that's changing again and this infographic explores the story of balance and unbalance in the world economy courtesy of the data from the [Angus] Maddison Project.
At the peak [of the Great Colonization Ages], just 10 - Number of countries left uncolonised by Western Imperialism.
And 62 - Number of treaty ports established in China by Western powers, 1841-1941
The 19th century appears to be the key juncture when China and India declined and the West rose. Imperialism appears to be the most obvious answer given that before China was 'opened' in 1842 in the first OPIUM WAR, it had its greatest share of world wealth. Within a century of these interventions China went from 32% of the world's GDP to just under 5%.
China - Spheres of Influence and Treaty Ports, c. 1900
http://thediplomat.com/2016/12/the-trouble-with-john-pilgers-the-coming-war-on-china/
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"The notion that journalism can regularly produce a product that violates the fundamental interests of media owners and advertisers…is absurd." - Robert McChesney, journalist and author
Asked to give a toast before the prestigious New York Press Club in 1880, John Swinton, the former Chief of Staff at the New York Times, made this candid confession [it's worth noting that Swinton was called "The Dean of His Profession" by other newsmen, who admired him greatly]:
"There is no such thing, at this date of the world’s history, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job.
If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify; to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell the country for his daily bread. You know it and I know it and what folly is this toasting an independent press. We are the tools and vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes." - John Swinton, the former Chief of Staff, The New York Times, New York Press Club.
The Trouble With John Pilger’s The Coming War on China
I was left feeling an odd mixture of sympathy and exasperation after enduring John Pilger’s latest documentary, The Coming War on China.
Despite the journalist’s long career of opposing tyranny, oppression, and dictatorship wherever he may find it, Pilger’s loathing of the United States has led him to produce a film that acts as an apology for Chinese totalitarianism, distorts the truth about Asian politics, and presents China as a passive victim in a potential new superpower war. Actually, my sympathy for his intellectual descent is less sincere than my anger; what I watched was an incendiary spectacle that manages to circle the triumvirate of narcissism, ignorance, and propaganda.
I was left feeling an odd mixture of exasperation and anger after enduring David Hutt's criticism to John Pilger’s latest documentary, The Coming War on China. The Diplomat's Southeast Asia columnist stationed in Cambodia seems to be very good at artfully and selectively presenting the many half-baked "facts" then twisting and spinning off words, should be no wonder knowing his profession as a "journalist".
I must admit a few things first. Among others it was Pilger who first sparked my interest in journalism. He gave me a short interview I published in December 2014. Later, I interviewed him again for an article I wrote on the 40th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War. Afterwards, however, we stopped conversing by email for a number of reasons.
This article sparked my further interest to dig deeper what's The Diplomat magazine and online publication.
The Diplomat Magazine
"Diplomat Media Pty Ltd is the publisher of the current affairs magazine The Diplomat: Australia's Window on the World. Although Australian based, The Diplomat has a long record of citations in the international media including, The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, The Times, as well as newspapers across Asia and the Middle East." [1]
Their website provides links to only the following think tanks (most of which are right wing):
- American Enterprise Institute
- Australian Strategic Policy Institute
- Brookings Institute
- CSIS
- CSIS (Indonesia)
- Carnegie Endowment
- CATO Institute
- Centre for Defence Information
- Centre for Independent Studies
- China Development Institute
- Council on Foreign Relations
- East West Centre
- Heritage Foundation
- Henry Thornton
- Hoover Institution
- IIPS (Japan)
- IISS (UK)
- ISIS (Malaysia)
- IPPR (UK)
- Institute of Southeast Asian Studies
- Institute of World Economics
- International Crisis Group
- Lowy Institute
- Overseas Development Institute
- RAND Corporation (US)
- Royal United Services Institute
- SIPRI (Sweden)
- World Policy Institute
- Worldwatch Institute
The original link of "About Us" quoted by SourceWatch is: http://www.the-diplomat.com/default.asp?page=aboutUs
However the link was broken, "Page not found", was already revamped totally, replaced by this one: http://thediplomat.com/the-diplomat/
now the "About Us" page is quite leaned, all links to those think tanks were removed.
Nonetheless one can still read back the earlier "About Us" content as archived by Wayback Machine many years ago: https://web.archive.org/web/20060821010511/http://www.the-diplomat.com/default.asp?page=aboutUs
Now, with personal reasons in light and with personal reasons aside, let me come to The Coming War on China, which was released at selected cinemas in Britain this month. First, the title had me concerned. “With” might have given the sense of shared responsibility for the possible war, but only an aggressor commits a war “on” another country. Pilger’s intellect cannot be doubted, so his semantic choice must have been intentional.
Much of the first 40 minutes of the 122 minute long documentary explores the United States’ destruction of Marshall Islands, used in the 1940s as a site for nuclear testing. It is upsetting and disturbing viewing, complete with the racist language of the 1940s and 1950s and the ease in which the people of the islands were exploited by the American government. It compares in effect to Pilger’s documentary on the destruction of the Chagos Islands, Stealing a Nation. A short part compares how the wealthy American expats live on the islands compared to the destitute locals, which is termed by Pilger as “apartheid in the Pacific.” Again, this is heartbreaking.
But, I found myself asking as the sequence ended, what does this have to do with the topic of the documentary: escalating tensions between the United States and China in the 21st century? Certainly what the United States did was a crime, but it was a crime committed decades ago. And except that the Marshall Islands are home to U.S. missile bases, there appears to be no other connection to the rest of the documentary.
My question to the author, David Hutt, should John Pilger tabulated all the United States crimes around the world, something like Steve Kangas did in his article "A Timeline of CIA Atrocities" ?
"The following timeline describes just a few of the hundreds of atrocities and crimes committed by the CIA. (1)
CIA operations follow the same recurring script. First, American business interests abroad are threatened by a popular or democratically elected leader. The people support their leader because he intends to conduct land reform, strengthen unions, redistribute wealth, nationalize foreign-owned industry, and regulate business to protect workers, consumers and the environment. So, on behalf of American business, and often with their help, the CIA mobilizes the opposition. First it identifies right-wing groups within the country (usually the military), and offers them a deal: "We'll put you in power if you maintain a favorable business climate for us." The Agency then hires, trains and works with them to overthrow the existing government (usually a democracy). It uses every trick in the book: propaganda, stuffed ballot boxes, purchased elections, extortion, blackmail, sexual intrigue, false stories about opponents in the local media, infiltration and disruption of opposing political parties, kidnapping, beating, torture, intimidation, economic sabotage, death squads and even assassination. These efforts culminate in a military coup, which installs a right-wing dictator. The CIA trains the dictator’s security apparatus to crack down on the traditional enemies of big business, using interrogation, torture and murder. The victims are said to be "communists," but almost always they are just peasants, liberals, moderates, labor union leaders, political opponents and advocates of free speech and democracy. Widespread human rights abuses follow.
This scenario has been repeated so many times that the CIA actually teaches it in a special school, the notorious "School of the Americas." (It opened in Panama but later moved to Fort Benning, Georgia.) Critics have nicknamed it the "School of the Dictators" and "School of the Assassins." Here, the CIA trains Latin American military officers how to conduct coups, including the use of interrogation, torture and murder.
The Association for Responsible Dissent estimates that by 1987, 6 million people had died as a result of CIA covert operations. (2) Former State Department official William Blum correctly calls this an "American Holocaust."
The CIA justifies these actions as part of its war against communism. But most coups do not involve a communist threat. Unlucky nations are targeted for a wide variety of reasons: not only threats to American business interests abroad, but also liberal or even moderate social reforms, political instability, the unwillingness of a leader to carry out Washington’s dictates, and declarations of neutrality in the Cold War. Indeed, nothing has infuriated CIA Directors quite like a nation’s desire to stay out of the Cold War.
The ironic thing about all this intervention is that it frequently fails to achieve American objectives. Often the newly installed dictator grows comfortable with the security apparatus the CIA has built for him. He becomes an expert at running a police state. And because the dictator knows he cannot be overthrown, he becomes independent and defiant of Washington's will. The CIA then finds it cannot overthrow him, because the police and military are under the dictator's control, afraid to cooperate with American spies for fear of torture and execution. The only two options for the U.S at this point are impotence or war. Examples of this "boomerang effect" include the Shah of Iran, General Noriega and Saddam Hussein. The boomerang effect also explains why the CIA has proven highly successful at overthrowing democracies, but a wretched failure at overthrowing dictatorships.
The following timeline should confirm that the CIA as we know it should be abolished and replaced by a true information-gathering and analysis organization. The CIA cannot be reformed — it is institutionally and culturally corrupt."
[...]
Endnotes:
1. All history concerning CIA intervention in foreign countries is summarized from William Blum’s encyclopedic work, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995). Sources for domestic CIA operations come from Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen’s The 60 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1997).
2. Coleman McCarthy, "The Consequences of Covert Tactics" Washington Post, December 13, 1987.
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/CIAtimeline.html
Or... General Wesley Clark - "Take out 7 countries in 5 years"
Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Iran.
How about the last decade destructions of Libya and Syria?
The Coming War on China does not engage in lies but it evades the truth so much that it is rendered invisible. (One doesn’t know whether Pilger appreciates his thoughts are often verbatim to what regularly appears in Chinese state television, though he fails to include one single clip from this media instead relying on a montage of American news shows to indicate a warmongering United States.) If, according to Joseph Goebbels, by telling a lie enough times it becomes the truth, then the reverse is also true: by evading the truth enough times it becomes a lie.
I beg your pardon: Warmongering China? Warmongering USA? Please, which one is fact, the truth, which one is fiction? Do you need any more hard facts, Mr. Hutt???
And who has all the overseas military bases encircling other countries???
Mapping United States Military Installations
http://empire.is/
This is what Pilger does throughout. For example, at the same time as the United States was tricking the people of the Marshall Islands back onto into highly contaminated and radiated homes, leaving many to die, the Communist Party of China was launching a nationwide campaign to suppress counter-revolutionaries. The official number of deaths when it came to an end was as high as 700,000, though some historians put it around the two million mark.
"Counter-revolutionary suppression"? Which historical occurrence did you mean, David Hutt?
The latter is not mentioned by Pilger. In fact, even the casual viewer would probably notice that he fails to mention any of the crimes committed by the CPC – even a visit to the party’s museum warrants no reference to these. For example, he mentions the Cultural Revolution in passing but doesn’t provide the unwitting viewer with the fact that as many as 30 million people died during these eleven years. He only says it gave way to “silence,” a most cruel euphemism. Indeed, Pilger is at his worst when he speaks with euphemisms, with the figurative raising of the eyebrow.
With regard to the "Cultural Revolution", which was preceded by the failed "Great Leap Forward" industrialization initiatives, here are few well-written related articles to ponder:
Did Millions Die in the Great Leap Forward: A Quick Note on the Underlying Statistics - Part 1
https://blog.hiddenharmonies.org/20...rd-a-quick-note-on-the-underlying-statistics/
Did Millions Die in the Great Leap Forward: A Quick Note on non-Contemporaneous Data - Part 2
https://blog.hiddenharmonies.org/20...ard-a-quick-note-on-non-contemporaneous-data/
Another Look at the Great Leap Forward
https://blog.hiddenharmonies.org/2013/01/17/another-look-at-the-great-leap-forward/
A Conversation with Boi Boi Huong on the Great Leap Forward
Recently I had a chance to speak with Boi Boi Huong (mp3, audio play link below). Her family emigrated to Holland from Vietnam when she was young. While in college, she took a stronger interest in China, and in fact completing her thesis on the Great Leap Forward. The timing of her work was interesting, because this had been just couple of years following 1989. Western academia and press at that time were especially hostile to China and China’s political system. The Great Leap Forward has always being used in the Western press and academia to vilify Mao Zedong and his policies, especially with the millions of deaths coinciding that period. Once Huong found out a bit about the circumstances of that period, she was able to quickly figure out the dominant narratives in the West were flawed. (Make sure to also read Ray‘s excellent post, “Another Look at the Great Leap Forward” and Allen‘s robust analysis of the death numbers, “Did Millions Die in the Great Leap Forward: A Quick Note on the Underlying Statistics.”)
To the Chinese, Mao was a symbol of modern China. Under his leadership, ordinary Chinese were finally freed from imperialism, invasions, and centuries of miserable life. Mao is more than the mere mistakes he has committed. Nor is he any of that exaggerated sins pinned against him in the West.
http://blog.hiddenharmonies.org/2013/04/22/a-conversation-with-boi-boi-huong-on-the-great-leap-forward/
Aside from the euphemism is the outright contradiction. For example, in direct contrast to the wealth of the Americans being critiqued in the Marshall Islands – and paired with America’s predatory capitalism of his earlier documentaries – the wealth of the Chinese is something Pilger doesn’t challenge. He listens without comment as he is told that China now has more billionaires than the United States. Upon making a return to China for the first time in decades (perhaps that’s the reason why he hardly mentions the country and never leaves the city to explore the countryside) he says that “coming back the change is barely comprehensible. Here in Shanghai the freedom bears no comparison.” He goes on: “Yes, there are issues with human rights, especially the right to speak against the state and challenge its power. Since I was last here, millions of people have been lifted out of poverty, many into a new middle class.”
He suggests that this growth of the middle class has been overlooked in the West or, perhaps, “willfully misunderstood” (This is not the first time Pilger has talked down to other journalists for not noting what he has seen). And then he suggests that since China has matched the United States at its own game of capitalism, it is “unforgivable,” supposedly, to the United States.
In a long article for the New Internationalist, published this month, Pilger does at least mention that inequality is rising and protests are taking place but goes on to say that “for all the difficulties of those left behind by China’s rapid growth… what is striking is the widespread sense of optimism that buttresses the epic of change.” Where is the interest in the millions of Chinese suffering in the ilk of his 2001 documentary The New Rulers Of The World, which deplored Asia becoming the workhouse of the world and its cheap laborers the greatest export?
And the author just ignored the hard facts:
Population scale: China has 1,386 millions vs USA has 326 millions... so if there are millions or even tens of millions left behind not enjoying much of the "economical cakes" in China, what to wonder then? Its size is simply gigantic, "unpresidented" in the mankind development. If one really wanna compare apple to apple, he can only honestly and meaningfully compare China to India as the sole two nations on earth having populations ever exceeding the 1,000,000,000 threshold throughout human history!
GeoHive - Current World Population
http://www.geohive.com/earth/population_now.aspx
And does the USA really have the better wealth distribution among its population? Because I understand that the world's richest individuals are Americans.
More accurate statistics by John Williams
http://www.shadowstats.com/
And the author should not forget, it is not as if China also owns the "World Reserve Currency", USD, "printers" so it can print conveniently to hand out the many welfare allowances to the many millions of its citizens through the SNAP/EBT/Food stamps and several other welfare hand-outs, it's estimated that about 1/6 of the US population depend on these welfare programs for living.
Perhaps the most illustrative part of this documentary is the relatively short time he spends in China. There, he interviews Zhang Weiwei, the former advisor to Deng Xiaoping, who describes the former premier as a “visionary” and goes on criticize the BBC and other Western media for mentioning in their news reports that China has a communist party and is an autocracy, and dismisses these as just labels, which Pilger doesn’t respond to. “If you watch BBC or CNN or read the Economist,” Zhang says, “and try to understand China, it will be a failure.” Again, no rebuttal from Pilger.
Should Hutt be reminded that even Donald Trump does think so?
Fake News© manufacturers, incl. the world largest ones
While the Communist China is a pretty clear labeling right instantly, the more surreptitious arms of the media tentacles owned and controlled by the few hands in the West are hardly noticeable, except to those who are willing to dive in and dig much deeper!
Six Companies Control 96% of the World’s Media (2015-10-17) | Tapnewswire
The most part of the public audience worldwide are NOT QUITE AWARE of the nearly total domination of the media business, information feeds and worldwide dissemination including all means of information mediums, almost everything you WATCH, SEE, HEAR and READ... are basically owned and controlled by the mere SIX COMPANIES CONTROL 96% of the WORLD'S MEDIA : 1) AOL TIME WARNER 2) THE WALT DISNEY CORPORATION 3) BERTELSMANN AG 4) VIACOM 5) NEWS CORPORATION 6) VIVENDI UNIVERSAL
The nearly total media domination by the very few hands: "Six Companies Control 96% Of The World's Media" published in October 2015, and many more references that can be found in the internet realm.
Through these SIX GIANT HOLDINGS they control over 1,500++ media corporations in various forms of news and entertainment channels and publications.
Then to Eric Li, a man Pilger describes as an entrepreneur and one of the confident political class. “In China there are a lot of problems,” Li says. “But at the moment, the Party state has proven an extraordinary ability to change.” He goes on to say that the reforms of the last 60 years are broader and greater than any other country in modern history. Pilger doesn’t ask whether these reforms were wanted by the people.
How many Chinese people should Pilger ask for?
How many millions to make it conclusive? Or... how many hundreds of millions??? One thing that westerners can hardly understand is that the importance of any individual can NOT exceed the importance of the many... of the society... of the public... let alone the interests of a nation!!!
David Hutt should have watched Eric Li's 20-minute presentation video: "Eric X. Li: A tale of two political systems" at below, it's presented before the American audience.
He then talks to Lijia Zhang, a Beijing-based journalist who published the best-selling book, ironically titled Socialism Is Great! “Many Americans imagine,” she says, “that Chinese people live a miserable, repressed life with no freedom whatsoever. That’s not true.” She says that if you talk to Chinese people (queue videos of smiling people) they will tell you that they are happy.
Amid all of this, Pilger does at least ask the question of exploitation of poor people as the principle creator of wealth. Zhang palms him off, saying that if you go and talk to the poor, the internal migrant workers, “you will be surprised that they have experienced greater increase in income than any other social groups.” Pilger does go to the poor but for less than a few minutes, simply showing their impoverished homes.
Again, since China has the gigantic population, of course it still has many poor people. For apple to apple comparison, then Hutt must see the world's largest democratic nation.
He asks Zhang about Tiananmen Square, saying the demonstrators fought for democratic change in China. “It was more than a tragedy, it was a massacre,” Pilger states, “of which the memory remains a raw presence in China.” He then asks Zhang: why does the Chinese state still fear “the few that speak out? He then informs the viewer about Liu Xiaobo, and listens as Zhang accuses the Nobel Peace Prize committee of making a “mistake” in naming Liu as a winner. “And yet in China today the spirit of protest lives on in different forms,” Pilger finishes.
"Tian Anmen Square"? I understand that David may surely prefer to see a Yugoslavia or USSR-style of break-up upon China, thus all his concerns or exasperation today won't be any more relevant.
Or some more subtleties in depicting the mental picture as expressed by following article:
The Nine Nations of China - The Atlantic
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/11/the-nine-nations-of-china/307769/
And at the author's own blog - Patrick Chovanec:
https://chovanec.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/the-nine-nations-of-china/
Or, the less subtle ideas by those foreign forces to carve out China into many smaller parts and only by the "historical miracle" or destined narrow escape, such break-up was denied by the break-out of the World War I in Europe. I once read such exposition but can't locate the right link, but even reading the controlled exposition of history of Shanghai at Wikipedia may still provide some understanding of this matter to some extent:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Shanghai
Search for "Imperialism in China: China's Century of Humiliation" and read on... books, presentations, web links... plenty
Colonial Powers Carve Up China, 1850-1910
All in all, Pilger’s exploration of the modern-day problems of China lasts from the 55th minute until 66th, much of which is given over to optimistic interviews with Chinese commentators and former government officials, who downplay the crimes of the government. One might say, well, at least Pilger does at least consider the democratic and human rights of more than one billion people.
Ha ha... you don't feed the billions of people and make them prosperous with the much politicized notions of "democratic and human rights" ... again, just look at the living conditions of "the world's largest democratic nation"! Hutt makes it as if the much touted value of "democratic and human rights" a kind of elixir that will cure the world's problems and make nations prosperous and harmonious. What a false reference!
But wait. The next section, called “Resistance,” which spans from the 66th minute until the 92nd, is dedicated to the actions of islanders in Japan and South Korea fighting against U.S. military bases – in South Korea, this takes the form of a dozen Catholics and two Quakers. Of course, the islanders’ fight is a noble one and they deserve attention. However, what is one to read from Pilger dedicating just 11 minutes to the fight of a billion people for democracy, human rights, and some autonomy from a country that happens to be the focus of the documentary, and 26 minutes to a small number of people in Japan and South Korea fighting against military bases?
Pilger begins the documentary by saying it is “a film about the human spirit, and about the rise of an extraordinary resistance.” But where is the extraordinary resistance mounted against China’s foreign endeavors? Why does he not mention the resistance of the Burmese against the Myitsone Dam? Or the Lao people to stop much of the country’s north being sold for cheap to Chinese businessmen? Or, for that matter, the Lao who demonstrated against their government after China decided to build dozens of dams in the country that will destroy most of the Mekong River? Or, even give one sentence over to the anti-Chinese protests in Vietnam? It is a shame Pilger does not even mention these, or that Myanmar is now a democratic country while China was happy to allow its murderous military junta to try to create a nation of slaves.
And WHY NO mentioning about the operations of many NGOs funded by George Soros' Open Society Foundation (OSF), National Endowment for Democracy (NED); and many other troublemaker incubating organizations there? And why not blame on China either for Aung San Suu Kyi's policies on Rohingya crisis in Myanmar?
Pilger consistently glosses over China’s past crimes while dwelling on America’s. He doesn’t mention that it was China that kept the Khmer Rouge in AK-47s, preventing Cambodia for returning to peace until almost two decades after the genocidal regime was overthrown in 1979. Neither does he ever mention Tibet or the Chinese role in the Vietnam War, and its continuing propping up of North Korea. Neither does he consider China’s actions in the South China Sea in more than a passing reference. Neither, for one moment, does he consider China’s economic actions abroad in the negative. Quite the opposite, in fact. In his New Internationalist article, he lauds China’s “New Silk Road,” saying that it “has the approval of much of humanity,” adding, with a sense of anti-West triumphalism, that “along the way, [it] is uniting China and Russia; and they are doing it entirely without ‘us’ in the West.” (This goes against the noble forms of resistance against Chinese capital abroad I mentioned above).
The author should have cursed that the Kangaroo Court of the International Tribunal Panel in Haque, a 3-person panel has no measurable effects on the South China Sea development. As well as China's immense and real investments in the economic cooperation and joint development with the Continent of Africa. Btw he missed out Xinjiang when he took Tibet in his artful representation
Indeed, he never considers this to be a Chinese form of globalization and, dare I say, economic imperialism – one of the world’s last Marxist-Leninist countries must have purged Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism from its reading list. “The initiative is a timely reminder that China under the Communist Party is building a new empire,” Friedrich Wu, a professor at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, told the Financial Times last year. How can Pilger sit back and applaud the so-called “Beijing Consensus,” which exports the worse of globalization to the world – the rise of predatory capitalism without the expectation for countries to develop democratically?
I ain't sure about "countries to develop democratically" (again, look at the largest democratic nation on earth) but I am pretty sure about countries to develop their economies and infrastructures thus improve people's livelihood in economic cooperation with China. And he missed out to expound the global weaponry exports by the western MIC and their "miraculous" devastating effects. Is it a preferred mutually beneficial trade/commerce/economy relationship?
For sure David Hutt emphasized too much the over idealized conceptual glories of "democracy and human rights" from his repeatedly articulated ideas, as if setting them as the final objectives themselves instead of just one of the means to achieve better life for the people that he ignored the utmost importance of people's real lives and the true fulfillment of the life necessities, while a prosperous and harmonious society may be beyond his comprehension.... or he is simply dishonest towards the world's real situation!
Pilger’s scattershots do not cohere to a conclusion; they only seek to confirm to his narrative. His anti-Americanism blurs all. In journalism circles, one could say he is not being objective. This is not necessarily a bad thing: one enjoys a good deal of subjectivity in reporting. But Pilger takes this to the extreme.
It is only in the last 30 minutes that the viewer actually gets to hear anything about the coming war. Though, 30 minutes is far too long. Indeed, this 122 minute documentary only makes a few boilerplate points: U.S. military bases “encircle” China, Obama has spent more on nuclear weapons than any other president, and U.S. military officials tend to speak in a gung-ho fashion about war. Here, I agree with Pilger. The United States has built bases that surround China, the outgoing administration is spending more on nuclear weapons than predecessors, and military officials aren’t the most softly-spoken people in front of cameras. But that doesn’t mean the United States is containing China or encircling it or, worse, threatening it.
Pilger tends to see coincidence as correlation. Since China is building its army at the same time as the United States tries to reassert authority in Asia, the former must be a result of the latter. That the United States has bases in much of the Pacific must mean it is on the war path. Yet, he never mentions the rise of Chinese nationalism under President Xi Jinping. As other leaders before Xi have learned, nationalism can be relied upon when other forms of legitimacy disappear. (In a speech in November 2013, Xi reiterated his goals of “the great revival of the Chinese nation.”)
Neither does Pilger look into military spending by China, which has been constant since 1994, according to data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. In 1994, military expenditure was 1.7 percent of GDP, rising to 2.2 percent in 2001, and falling to 1.9 percent in 2015. In fact, as a percentage of government spending, military expenditure was more than double its 2015 value in 1994 (6.3 percent in 2015, compared to 14.4 percent in 1994). This precedes the United States’ “pivot to Asia” by more than a decade. Lastly, Pilger never inquires into whether other countries in the region might actually take the United States’ side on the issue, or, for that matter, why the countries now lining up behind China – Cambodia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Russia, and so on – tend to be either autocratic, partly democratic, or under the guardianship of populists with dictatorial-leanings. Without reference to these, his narrative tumbles into a dangerous excuse, or propaganda, for the Chinese state.
Military spending??? Not again! What a farcical notion. The USA has bigger offense spending than the sum up of the next 6 largest nations or so. Ha ha ha
Worse, he sees any country allied with the United States as a warmonger. While exploring opposition to U.S. bases in Japan, he criticizes the country’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, whose American “patron” has helped stoke Japanese nationalism and to reassert Japanese power. He does the same for South Korea. Just perhaps, however, the Japanese and South Korean governments are reacting to Chinese assertive actions rather than being belligerent on their own accord. As I was told last year by the journalist Bill Hayton, author of The South China Sea: The Struggle for Power in Asia, “the U.S. hasn’t been forcing these countries to ask it to send military equipment and ships. These countries are nervous and are asking the U.S. for reassurance because they perceive a threat from China.”
A fallacy arises here. Pilger descends into the myth that the United States is all powerful – the repeated use of an image of military bases around the world seeks to convey this. Yet, if its power and warmongering attitude were true, then why, one can ask, hasn’t the United States gone to war with China already? Presumably, a conflict-craving nation wouldn’t allow China to build up its nuclear and military capabilities before attacking. The fact that China now has the world’s second largest expenditure on its military, after the United States, would actually deter the latter from attacking, one might assume.
A more nuanced understanding of the situation would be to admit that both the United States and China are engaging in actions that could run the risk of sparking a new superpower war. More serious articles and books have explored the duality of the situation, treating both the United States and China as equal players, and I would recommend any of the following before watching one minute of The Coming War on China: Bill Hayton’s The South China Sea: The Struggle for Power in Asia; Lyle Goldstein’s Meeting China Halfway: How to Defuse the Emerging U.S.-China Rivalry; or Edward N. Luttwak’s The Rise of China vs The Logic of Strategy.
As a closing remark, timing most likely meant Pilger had to force into his documentary a brief comment about Donald Trump. He says, “the new president Donald Trump has a problem with China. And the question is whether Trump will continue with the provocations included in this film and take us to war.” Well, this is quite a departure from Pilger’s earlier comments about the president-elect, most of which were evident at a speech he gave in March at the University of Sydney (an edited transcript can be found here).
All too happy to leap head-first down the rabbit hole of ‘the enemy of my enemy is a friend,’ he said that “[Trump] is certainly odious; but he is also a media hate figure. That alone should arouse our skepticism.” Next he tried comparing Trump to the former British Prime Minister David Cameron, without explaining how Cameron was as extreme on immigration as Trump, before calling Obama the “Great Deporter.” He then added that Trump is “a maverick. He says the invasion of Iraq was a crime; he doesn’t want to go to war with Russia and China. The danger to the rest of us is not Trump, but Hillary Clinton. She is no maverick. She embodies the resilience and violence of a system whose vaunted ‘exceptionalism’ is totalitarian with an occasional liberal face.”
Well, Pilger has now got his wish. His maverick is set to take charge. If the “totalitarian with an occasional liberal face” of Hilary Clinton is gone, then one can only suppose that Pilger is ecstatic that the ‘totalitarian with a permanent totalitarian face’ of China and Russia will now not be troubled by an isolationist president-elect.
Just to conclude (skipping some parts of this lengthy article, may others please add up), whatever skirmish China may have domestically or even the civil war among the Chinese people (like the CCP vs KMT), it threatens none the world and during the most of its very long history it mostly falls into the pathetic victim of the foreign invaders and interventions. It's a terribly painful historical curses and dooms that should be prevented for good and at any price!
Finally, a revisit about the economic achievement, following article and charts are worth to read.
Share of world GDP throughout history
https://infogr.am/Share-of-world-GDP-throughout-history
Since 1AD until today the world's changed quite a lot. But until 1700AD the balance of wealth hadn't. For the past two centuries the share of the world's GDP has shifted to the west to Europe through imperialism, and technological innovation. With the rise of China that's changing again and this infographic explores the story of balance and unbalance in the world economy courtesy of the data from the [Angus] Maddison Project.
At the peak [of the Great Colonization Ages], just 10 - Number of countries left uncolonised by Western Imperialism.
And 62 - Number of treaty ports established in China by Western powers, 1841-1941
The 19th century appears to be the key juncture when China and India declined and the West rose. Imperialism appears to be the most obvious answer given that before China was 'opened' in 1842 in the first OPIUM WAR, it had its greatest share of world wealth. Within a century of these interventions China went from 32% of the world's GDP to just under 5%.
China - Spheres of Influence and Treaty Ports, c. 1900
http://thediplomat.com/2016/12/the-trouble-with-john-pilgers-the-coming-war-on-china/
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"The notion that journalism can regularly produce a product that violates the fundamental interests of media owners and advertisers…is absurd." - Robert McChesney, journalist and author
Asked to give a toast before the prestigious New York Press Club in 1880, John Swinton, the former Chief of Staff at the New York Times, made this candid confession [it's worth noting that Swinton was called "The Dean of His Profession" by other newsmen, who admired him greatly]:
"There is no such thing, at this date of the world’s history, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job.
If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify; to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell the country for his daily bread. You know it and I know it and what folly is this toasting an independent press. We are the tools and vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes." - John Swinton, the former Chief of Staff, The New York Times, New York Press Club.
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ChineseTiger1986
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Yep, they are just self-aggrandizing in order to make the US looks super strong.
China is now armed to the teeth with the MIRVed hypersonic nuclear warheads on both DF-5C and DF-41A, and it would be foolish to believe that China would get intimidated by the child play like these.
Jlaw
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yup. even old exported missiles like c-802 sold to middle East countries , than cheaply re-engineered knocked out an Israeli corvette. imagine what the state of the art Chinese missiles can do.
terranMarine
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The documentary by Pilger illustrates the threat of an escalation between the Big 3 powers is very real and unnecessary. In his opinion the first Cold War has already ended but a second Cold War is in the making this time it's not just US-Russia but more importantly a showdown between US-China. Personally i believe the first Cold War never ended in the first place. After the fall of USSR, the US kept on targetting Communist countries. Anyway from the number of foreign military bases the US has, many crouching towards Russia and China, one can guess how insecure the US actually in reality is. Yes many believe the US is the only world super power or a global power if you like. If that was the case, then why the constant provocations towards Russia and especially China? Obviously the US is no longer the only super power which it enjoyed this status after the end of WW2. That war left Great Britain, Europe, Russia, China, Japan devastated and the only one unscathed was the US. It became the biggest economy, the biggest creditor, the biggest military. The Dollar became the de facto world currency, the creation of the World Bank and IMF so naturally the US has seen itself as the world leader for decades. Now the world has changed drastically, Japan was rebuild and reached its peak during the 80s, a time when Americans were worried Japan would surpass the US. The emergence of China especially after the financial crisis in 2008 taking the role of a very important (if not the most important) economic engine has increased this insecurity. The US once the biggest creditor has become the biggest debtor in today's world. It's not about Democracy vs Communist nor is it about Freedom vs Regime. These are mere propaganda tools the US use, the brainwashing, the lies to justify their military presence, military operations overseas and most importantly the sales of US military hardware.
Simply put, the US does not want to share. It wishes to contain Russia through NATO, China through East Asian allies by using military presence. Stirring up trouble with missile shields, military drills practicing naval blockade, sending more troops in our own yards. In the case of Russia US can utilize embargo/sanctions, forcing its allies to do the same. Since China is the worlds biggest trading nation, the world factory the US is not so hasty repeating this strategy against China without hurting itself. So the only thing left is using propaganda scaring China's neighbors on the SCS disputes. The pivot didn't work out under the Obama administration, lets wait and see what Trump will do since some of his staff are very hawkish on the rise of China. Trump on the other hand wishes to separate Russia from China while many US politicians remain hostile towards Putin. This undoubtedly will cause frictions for Trump's strategy not to mention how worried some European countries are of the direction Trump is taking the US in warming up relations with Russia. Putin on the other hand is no idiot either, missile shields in Europe and now THAAD in South Korea will certainly not help Trump on this matter and i'm delighted to see how China and Russia will cooperate even closer dealing with the latest threat. A reverse Nixon is unlikely to succeed when the world sees how the US is a declining power. Military speaking the US will remain for a long time the only global power because China and Russia never saw the necessity and never want to have overseas military bases covering the world. Nonetheless China and Russia are military super powers no matter how some arrogant people label them as regional powers. The current near $20 trillion debt will keep on increasing and faced with decaying infrastructure the US does look like a third world country from that perspective. As Jack Ma said at Davos the US spends too much on wars and doesn't distribute the budget to the people (infrastructure). It will be a daunting task for Trump to make America great again regardless his repetitive slogan "It's gonna be America first, America first", and the answer is NO, Great Wall, Isolation, Muslim ban from certain countries, Meddling in other countries' sovereignty and More Wars will not make America great again.
Simply put, the US does not want to share. It wishes to contain Russia through NATO, China through East Asian allies by using military presence. Stirring up trouble with missile shields, military drills practicing naval blockade, sending more troops in our own yards. In the case of Russia US can utilize embargo/sanctions, forcing its allies to do the same. Since China is the worlds biggest trading nation, the world factory the US is not so hasty repeating this strategy against China without hurting itself. So the only thing left is using propaganda scaring China's neighbors on the SCS disputes. The pivot didn't work out under the Obama administration, lets wait and see what Trump will do since some of his staff are very hawkish on the rise of China. Trump on the other hand wishes to separate Russia from China while many US politicians remain hostile towards Putin. This undoubtedly will cause frictions for Trump's strategy not to mention how worried some European countries are of the direction Trump is taking the US in warming up relations with Russia. Putin on the other hand is no idiot either, missile shields in Europe and now THAAD in South Korea will certainly not help Trump on this matter and i'm delighted to see how China and Russia will cooperate even closer dealing with the latest threat. A reverse Nixon is unlikely to succeed when the world sees how the US is a declining power. Military speaking the US will remain for a long time the only global power because China and Russia never saw the necessity and never want to have overseas military bases covering the world. Nonetheless China and Russia are military super powers no matter how some arrogant people label them as regional powers. The current near $20 trillion debt will keep on increasing and faced with decaying infrastructure the US does look like a third world country from that perspective. As Jack Ma said at Davos the US spends too much on wars and doesn't distribute the budget to the people (infrastructure). It will be a daunting task for Trump to make America great again regardless his repetitive slogan "It's gonna be America first, America first", and the answer is NO, Great Wall, Isolation, Muslim ban from certain countries, Meddling in other countries' sovereignty and More Wars will not make America great again.
Deino
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